Indian grid failure offers lesson to us all

A little conservation is in order. As is an upgrade to the US electrical grid. Photo: Woodley Wonder Works via Flickr.

A Washington Post story yesterday about the (so far) two-day electricity blackout that affected 600 million citizens was a study in trying to find an answer to the acute predicament facing Mother India. Numerous officials are cited in the article, mainly scratching their heads, baffled over the cause of grid collapse. Yet one paragraph stood out for its more definitive take on the problem.

Indian industry leaders blamed the incident on a large and growing gap between electricity demand and supply, something that the government has failed to tackle despite repeated pledges to do so. Some senior government officials say reform of the power sector is the greatest challenge facing Asia’s third-largest economy in the next few years.

None of this should be surprising, and not just because of India’s large population, its less than up-to-date grid, or its unwillingness to exploit coal reserves at a faster rate (environmental concerns are at least a partial check on extraction in India).

But the incident is a cautionary tale for us all.

In the US we may be staring at our own fate in India’s crisis. I’d suggest getting ready for it to come to a neighborhood near you sooner rather than later. Even the recent derecho was a reminder that, in fact, electricity doesn’t come from the switches on our walls, and that even our grid can look like spit balls and duct tape when an angry Mother Nature comes calling.

The issue at stake with these unconventional fossil fuels is foremost the costs of extraction, which aren’t lessened because of the reported advances in fracking and horizontal drilling — extraction machinery with huge price tags for build out and use. The energy it takes to extract and refine the resources remains high, while the water-intensive application sucks up massive energy (whether or not it’s a drought year), and the impact on local roadways, infrastructure, and ecosystems is profound.

But in the end, for natural gas at least, the rapid rate of decline curves, the preponderance of dry holes, and the low ratio of return — not in dollars, which float independently of geological reality, but in the energy returned on energy invested or EROEI — tell the real story, making future costs prohibitive, a definitive drag on the economy. Natural gas seems dirt cheap now, but as the other factors catch up, and supply tightens, prices will rapidly increase.

And all this leads us to the US’s own failing infrastructure, aged power grid, and centralization of power plants, a very vulnerable position for the so-called greatest nation on earth.

Responses, not solutions

It’s true that no amount of renewable energy will let us live at the scale we currently enjoy, with our copious consumption, brazen wastefulness, indifference to conservation, and suburban development patterns. Yet there are myriad applications for conservation and renewables (with the latter as distributed rather than centralized power) which create jobs, move money, and set the stage for a shift to an undeniably lower energy future. Aggressively moving on this front can also prompt at least a temporary stimulus to the broader economy.

It’s easy to see India’s grid collapse as India’s problem alone, what with it being a developing nation and all, and for having such a large population (twice the size of the US) — the whole demand outstripping supply thing in its most obvious presentation. But demand is outstripping supply worldwide; that is what peak oil, peak coal, and peak nuclear is all about.

Energy IS the economy, stupid

Why this topic isn’t at the center of this year’s presidential race is beyond me because, if “it’s the economy, stupid,” I can guarantee you that, in spite of the delusions of the popular form of genteel gambling known as investment banking, the entire economy rides on the primary economy. And, as neoclassical economists fail to note at our whole society’s peril, the primary economy is the economy of nature, natural resources. In our case, on 21st century Earth, that is the energy economy, which is still the fossil fuel economy. Just try pulling energy out of the equation and two seconds later enjoy an “Aha” moment.

Energy is in everything.

Energy is the conversation behind every conversation about the economy, modernity, our way of life, the culture that rides on that, women’s rights, wealth and poverty, education, international relations, war, peace, family, children and everything else.

With the derecho we only had six million without power on one side of the country. But with computers, almost everything’s linked now. What isn’t linked along a direct line is linked somewhere indirectly. The derecho was a dress rehearsal for even bigger blackouts inevitably coming in the future, and the domino effects that come in its wake.

India’s 600 million powerless for two days (so far) is a warning to us all. Time to pay heed.

Comments

“Energy is the economy”.
Yes, but the problem is that it is an extractive economy.
Upgrading the power grid is just one more way to accelerate the extraction process and increase the growth rate of the yeast (humans) on the petri dish (earth).

How did India get to such a population WITHOUT the grid? What should they be doing to improve their situation other than using such a massively vulnerable system?

Local foods, local energy (muscles and wind and solar). If people are outside working on the land, they aren’t using air conditioning. They aren’t going to choose to work outside the air conditioning as long as it is an economical choice. The ‘government’ shouldn’t be upgrading the grid or paying for it. The corporations that sell electricity should bear the full cost, and any government help should be added to the price with sales taxes.
Cheap energy and cheap food do not help anyone’s future.

I wasn’t necessarily suggesting that we update the grid, particularly if that is just more computer linked connections. I thought I was clear that centralization is not the answer. But I do think we need to be mindful of the vulnerabilities, and begin to make shifts — to municipal and regional utilities, to distributed power, and with more conservation.

Distributed power is the future.
Do read Dr Murphy’s latest post “MY MODEST SOLAR SETUP”.
He describes how he’s transitioned to partial solar, how much he’s saved, how much he’s learned about energy in a finite system though he’s been an Astrophysicist for far longer than he’s had solar panels: physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/07/my-modest-solar-setup/